20 miles, check!

The twenty miler went really well this morning. Stayed on pace the whole time, the weather was gorgeous, and I dressed completely appropriately for once. I usually overdress but I fought my desires and stuck with what I knew would work. Which, by the way, includes the most awesome jacket in the world, which my awesome mom gave me for Christmas. The Nike Convertible jacket. Once it started to warm up, I zipped off the sleeves and handily stashed them into one of the many pockets. Perfection. Anyway, I am definitely feeling pretty good about this race! Not sure I'm going to break 4 like I'm hoping, given the hills and all, but I think it will be a good run, and fun.

My stomach is freaking killing me now though. But, I felt great on the run, and really, that's all I care about.

So, the clean eating thing. I recently read Rachel Cosgrove's new book, The Female Body Breakthrough. It's awesome, and I'm super fired up to do the workouts in it. (Her husband did the workouts for the book The New Rules of Lifting for Women. I just finished these workouts and have noticed a huge change in my body in the past 5 months or so.) The book really encourages you to lift heavy weights and eat clean 90% of the time. Since I am now a full believer of the importance of weight lifting (I guess I should try to do some before and after pics to make you a believer too!), I thought I'd try out the other component. I eat pretty clean already, but I could definitely do better. I've gotten pretty lax about a piece of candy here, a cookie there, a pop with dinner. Eating clean involves eating as close to the natural food source as possible, without additives or processing. So, no white sugar. Also no bread, even whole wheat. Ezekiel bread, made with sprouted grains, is considered ok though, and I am now fully obsessed with the Ezekiel English muffins. So good. She also wants you to eat 5-6 mini meals, and every meal should have a vegetable or fruit, and a protein.

So, as of Tuesday or Wednesday, I've pretty much completely cut out sugar, refined flours, processed food, and alcohol. Alcohol is the biggie and will certainly factor into the 10% splurges I'm allowed to have per week. (I've actually been splurging about once per day, instead of 3-4 times per week, as I ease into it. But they're been mostly good splurges - a piece of whole wheat bread, some low fat microwave popcorn, etc. Nothing horrific if you ignore Thursday night. :P) I have to say, I'm feeling pretty terrific. I think it had a lot to do with my lack of Diet Coke craving. And I haven't been craving sugar either. (I did have some DC and a little bit of candy after my run today, as I know I burned off a gazillion calories.) I have a lot of stomach problems, and I felt really good through my run today.

So, I consider this a big experiment. At least for the next 4 weeks, until my reunion, I'm going to try to eat like this very consistently. I might decide at that point that it's not worth the trouble and extra expense, but so far, it's not a huge shift from my regular eating and I'm interested to see how big of an impact it has on me. I've been reading other things about the negative impact of additives and chemicals on the body functions (especially metabolism), and it kind of makes a lot of sense when I really think about it. So, stay tuned.